Umbraco, Orchard: Content from custom Table

Question

I am currently investigating the possibilities of different CMSs for a company-site. Done quite a few projects in classical ASP, ASP.NET, Joomla etc..

I would like to use Umbraco or Orchard for the first time.

For that project we have a SQL-Table with Departmenst and a second with Job-Opportunities: like: JobName, DepartmentID, Description, etc.. So a 1:n relationship.

A first page should list Departments with links to sub-pages of Jobs available

These should be listed on a second page. In ASP.NET I would use something like a Repeater, etc.. with PageSize option and automatic paging.

In the Backend (Backoffice in Umbraco, I assume) there has to be an Insert/Edit/Delete Page with the corresponding input boxes, which are maintained by the company employees, not by web-developers.

So in both cms I try to accomplish an Access-like table-form in the backend like:

Job       |  Description   | ....
Job1      |  descr1        | ....[edit][delete]
Job2      |  descr2        | ....[edit][delete]
Job3      |  descr3        | ....[edit][delete]
[New Job]

Which route should I look at? I am completely stuck, is there an example anywhere? Can I use my own data-tables, or could/should I use the built-in content tables for this?

Thank you, Reinhard

A CMS is not Access ;) This being said, Orchard is MVC, so anything you can do in MVC, you can do in Orchard. You may want to look for an MVC tutorial solving a similar problem, it shouldn't be too difficult. — Bertrand Le Roy

E.J. Brennan E.J. Brennan · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-01T17:49:31

This sounds relatively straightforward, in Umbraco anyway, you could use either the built-in content tables, or else use straight SQL server tables and write the code to 'talk' to the db yourself.

The benefit of using the content tables in Umbraco however, is that everything else will be easier to do; everything else in the system is designed to just use those content tables with no extra coding...unless you have a tremendous amount of data, or some special requirements you haven't mentioned, I would definitely fully explore the possibility of just using the built in Umbraco functionality for this, before deciding to roll-your-own custom tables within umbraco.

Its possible, and not that hard, but is is extra work that you shouldn't do unless necessary.

Not familiar with Orchard, so can't comment on that.

Umbraco, Orchard: Content from custom Table

1 Answers